"What is the restaurant's phone number? I want to book a table."
Translation:饭馆的电话号码是多少？我要订位。
15 Comments
The 的 in that sentence I think can be omitted. But then that might only be passable in colloquial speech and not technically correct.
It told me I was wrong for not putting a question mark but there was no question mark
In Qingdao they use 多少 but it definitely feels stange to me. People use 什么 as well
The 是 and 的 are often superfluous in this construction during casual conversation.
多少?! Really how could somebody make such a mistake. Duoshao CANNOT be used like this. It's just awkward. Duoshao is how much, shenme would be what you use.
Except that in Chinese, 多少 is what we use to ask for phone numbers (leading to Chinese occasionally mistakenly asking "How much is your number" when speaking in English as well.) But it is perfectly valid and the correct way to to express this sentence in Chinese.
I've more often heard people use 电话号码是社么.
This is because a phone number is more of an identifier than a quantity, so it's true, to me, a native speaker, it sounds very awkward to hear how much is someone's phone number.
Using 多少 for phone numbers seems to be the most common way in a YouTube search: https://youtu.be/2KA6_iJF6u0 https://youtu.be/JssP1Hn07w4
Mmhm. Not sure if this is regional, but can confirm as a native Chinese speaker that asking how much their phone number is isn't something that we generally use.
I've lived in the southeast of the country for a few years (near Shanghai and now near Shenzhen). I hear both relatively frequently, but I agree that I hear 什么 more often.
I live in Singapore, and have spoken Chinese all my life – we never, ever use 多少 to mean anything other than how much. Well, pretty interesting to see how people from China use it - you learn something new every day!
Native speaker here: Never in my life have I heard people use duoxiao to ask for a phone number, it was always shenme. I'm from the south though, so maybe the northerners do it different.
